


Westgate Medical Clinic

by Aaskada



Category: Original Work, The Hortlak (Magic for Beginners-Kelly Link)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-07
Updated: 2013-05-07
Packaged: 2017-12-10 17:27:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 850
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/788263
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aaskada/pseuds/Aaskada





	Westgate Medical Clinic

Lawrence slept in a nest of sterilized towels in the storage room next to the office, which had been taken over by paperwork and patient files and didn't have any room for actual work anymore. He was the doctor in charge of the clinic when the owner wasn't in. He worked pro bono in exchange for staying in the store and being supplied with eggs and bread that he could cook on a propane stove in the tiny break room. There were granola bars as well, but they were for the patients only. Maria was the secretary. She only worked for eight hours during the day and she got paid twenty dollars an hour to answer the phone, set up appointments, and tell the patients which room to go to. She mostly spent her time playing minesweeper on the clinic's computer. She lost most of the games, but always insisted she was getting better at it. She kept a collection of Halloween masks in one of her desk drawers; her favorite was Hillary Clinton. Besides her, the janitor, a German immigrant names Alfons, got paid fourteen dollars an hour to clean up the daily messes of the clinic and whoever wandered in that day. The frogs always made the biggest messes because they would track in water from outside. They only ever came in when it was raining and they'd sit in the waiting room for hours waiting for the rain to stop before going back outside to sit in the puddles that formed by the storm drain that always got blocked up.

Angela stopped by the clinic to bring them muffins, which was how they knew it was the third Wednesday of the month. The muffins were banana nut; that was how they knew it was April. Maria set the muffins in front of the clinic's only calendar; the calendar was drawn on a dry erase board with permanent marker and only showed a week at a time. She erased everything written under Monday and Tuesday and wrote "third week of April" at the top with the purple dry erase marker. Wednesdays were alway slow. Richard wandered into the clinic an hour late, like he normally did, and washed his hands in the break room sink. They didn't have any patients, so he sat in one of the plastic chairs and watched Lawrence make fried eggs and toast on the propane stove.

A woman with an infected cut on her leg came in around noon and a couple of frogs hopped onto chairs while the door was still open. Lawrence cleaned out the cut and wrapped with an Ace bandage before prescribing her some antibiotics. She paid the thirty dollars for the appointment in ones and limped out the door before turning on her heel and pretending she had never been there, as if the appointment had been something scandalous. After that Lawrence retreated to the storage closet to re-rearrange the shelves. The sanitary wipes had been next to the sterilized needles since February, so he moved things around so the wipes were closer to the gloves and the needles were with the bottles of pills.

Alfons was mopping the linoleum floors again. Mopping mostly consisted of moving around the water the frogs brought in with the mop so that it dried faster, but sometimes he actually cleaned the floor in the evenings when they didn't have any patients. He lived in the apartment building next door with Angela, but he only went over there to eat and sleep. He still paid half the rent and Angela stuck to her muffin schedule. Angela was OCD, so her muffin schedule was the most important thing to her. She owned a bakery two blocks away and walked by twice a day at seven AM and seven PM except for the third Wednesday of the month when she stopped by with muffins before going to work.

Leah was a hypochondriac that stopped by once a day and asked about whatever disease she thought she had that day. She learned about them on Web MD and they only charged her five dollars for a visit because she never actually had anything. She came in after lunch that day and told Richard she had breast cancer.

"Do you want to come back when Jessica is here?"

"No, I want you to check now. Early detection is important."

Jessica never worked on Wednesdays or Saturdays. She played tetris and sudoku on her phone and chewed gum loudly because it annoyed Maria.

Leah sat on the table and stared at Richard. He shifted on his feet and went to get Lawrence.

"She says she's got breast cancer," he said. "How do you tell?"

"We don't have the equipment to test that here," Lawrence told him. "Tell her to get an appointment with a specialist if she's still sure tomorrow."

They didn't charge Leah for that appointment. She came back the next day saying she had small pox so Richard gave her some of the sugar pills and they charged her an extra two dollars for them.


End file.
